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There is a theory in evolutionary biology that reciprocal altruism and cooperation first appeared as a solution to the food storage problem. If you were an early hominid and you killed a large mammoth, you could not possibly eat it all before it rotted. So you shared it. The best bank for your excess capital was your friend's stomach. That way, you could play banker when your friend killed the next mammoth.

I was thinking of this little idea recently in the context of human wealth. Unless you are a professional investor (and probably even then), places to store surplus capital today where it will even be safe and/or not depreciate too fast (let alone generate a return) are getting incredibly hard to find. The stock market seems to be a secular, bearish bloodbath. Volatility and unexpected temporary rallies are making short games dangerous. Even staying liquid in dollars seems to have its dangers, due to threats of devaluation and unfamiliar new terms like "quantitative easing" which us average investors are starting to hear for the first time. The Euro isn't exactly a great alternative at the moment. Investing in gold and similar commodities seems to require a somewhat apocalyptic mindset and decisions about whether or not you want access to the actual metal if things go to hell (which isn't to say such a mindset isn't justified at the moment).

But there is one safe haven, if you know how to invest in it: software developers.

The Right Investment for Pre-Apocalyptic Times

The one absolutely solid place to store your capital today -- if you know how to do it -- is in software developers' wallets. If the world survives looming financial apocalypse dangers at all, this is the one investment that will weather the storms. It doesn't matter whether you are an individual or a corporation, or what corner of the world you inhabit. You need to find a way to invest in software developers.

In what follows, I am deliberately going to talk about the developers like they are products in a meat market. For practical purposes, they are, since the vast majority of them haven't found a way to use their own scarcity to their advantage. Which means others find a way to do so. In capitalism, every human is either a capitalist, somebody else's capital, or economically worthless. Today, this abstract point specifically translates to: people who can invest in developers, developers, and everybody else. This means that if you are in apparently more fundamental professions -- perhaps you are a baker with a small business -- you are effectively useless, not because bread isn't important, but because surviving in the bread business is now a matter of having developers on your side who can help you win in a game that Yelp, Groupon and other software companies are running to their advantage. If your bakery doesn't have an iPhone app, it will soon be at the mercy of outfits like Yelp.

And god forbid, if you don't have a skill, like baking, which the developer-centric economy can actually use, you are in deep trouble. One reason the Occupy Wall Street movement is not having the impact it seems like it should, based on sheer numbers of people involved, is that many participants simply have no cards left to play in this national game of economic poker.

We'll switch from this meat-market perspective to the humanist developer point of view at the end of the post.

Investing in good developers is such a good bet at the moment, that if you have money and you happen to find a talented developer who seems to like you and wants to work with you, you should give him/her your money to build something, anything, even if you have no really good product ideas (those are cheap; I'll sell you a dozen for a dollar). If you don't have money, you should offer up whatever other kind of surplus you do have. The NPV on a strong and positive relationship with a talented developer today is ridiculously high. If you gain the trust of a talented developer to the point that they are likely to drop any active gig in the future in favor of joining one of your projects, the value is through the roof. The world is your oyster, which you with your developer will open.

I warned you I was going to objectify and dehumanize programmers.

On the flip side of the coin, I've known people with complementary talents (such as raising money or marketing products) who return the loyalty in extreme ways -- insisting on working with their trusted developers even if that means walking away from million dollar deals.